Interview: Rise Against - 'I hope we can change some minds'

RA guitarist Zach Blair on success, subverting the system and the quartet's new album, The Black Market

Who’d have thought, when Rise Against started life in 1999, their politically-charged punk rock would go on to sell millions of records and threaten the top of the Billboard album charts (2011’s Endgame hit the number two spot, just behind Adele)? Certainly not the band members.

But in their
near-fifteen years as a unit, the band – vocalist Tim McIlrath,
guitarist Zach Blair, bassist Joe Principe and drummer Brandon Barnes
– have done just that, challenging society’s conventions and
injustices through a series of socially-conscious and
politically-minded albums. But while this is very much a band with a
purpose and an agenda, they’re not didactic, and their songs are
always open to interpretation. Ahead of the release of their seventh
record, The Black Market, Zach Blair – who joined the band in
2007 – explains why you don’t have to agree with them, or their
intention, to be a fan of the band.

Let’s start
with The Black Market: can you explain what it means to you?

“It’s an
interesting concept. The way Tim explained it when he conceptualised
it – well, what I took from it – was that everything is a black
market nowadays. It’s a bleak outlook, I guess, but that everything
is being processed and packaged and marketed and shoved down our
throats and sent to us in some inorganic way. And I think that was
the idea behind the cover, with the girl with a piece of our logo on
her face, and our logo being everywhere – that we’re sort of in
on the joke as well. Our logo is a logo, no matter what. It’s not
the Coca-Cola logo, but it is a logo and it’s a way to market our
band. So there’s a bit of black humour there, and I love that idea.
As far as the record goes, we wrote a lot in the studio and it was
kind of an easier experience than a lot of our other records. I don’t
know why, because we weren’t as prepared when we started it. Maybe
it was because we were on the same page that when we did start it
just happened more organically than the other ones. It was
probably my favourite experience yet making records with this band.”

How do you think your
intentions as a band have changed since you began? I spoke
to Billy Bragg a few years ago and he was saying how, when he first
started, his idea was to overthrow capitalism for a better system,
but he realised years later that he couldn’t do that, that
capitalism probably was the best system and he had to find a way from
within it to subvert it. Have your ideologies changed to that extent? Is there a self-awareness about who you are as a political band now
that there wasn’t before?

“Yes. And that in
itself, like Billy Bragg said – and it’s an honour to even have
our name in the same sentence – when you’re younger, you tend to
feel like you can do everything you’ve set out to do, and then you
realise that maybe you need to change your thoughts a bit, but
there’s still something you can do with it. So I think that’s
kind of what we’re doing, and that’s another thing this record
is, a way to reimagine commercials as saying something good or
promoting a good cause instead of something that’s just going to
fucking kill you, which is a lot of commercials nowadays. So I think
that was another point to this record, to reimagine marketing and
reimagine commercialism, because it is capitalism, commercialism is
capitalism at its finest – it’s going ‘Oh no, it’s okay for
me to do this – I can completely throw my product down your throat
and eventually the product is going to give you lung cancer or skin
cancer.’”

Obviously, you
guys are a very successful band who have sold millions of records.
How do you reconcile your success with your political leanings?

“Well, it’s something I’ve said a lot and Tim has definitely
said a lot – if you’re getting people paying attention to you,
you can say a few things. You can talk about partying, you can talk
about chicks, you can talk about drugs – you can do the rock ’n’ roll
guy thing. And I’m not disparaging the rock ’n’ roll guy thing at
all: a lot of my heroes are the rock ’n’ roll guy. Or you could do
what Pete Seeger or Ian McKaye or Tom Morello or Billy Bragg have
done and you can talk about things that mean something to you and
hope people are listening and maybe they’ll go and they’ll try to
do it themselves, or they’ll take your influence and go even
further with it. That’s what this band has always done and that’s
one of the things I loved about this band before I joined, because
that’s a brave thing to do. It’s so easy to do the rock ’n’ roll
guy thing. It’s so easy to talk about partying and getting laid.
It’s what people want to hear. It’s what the mass public want to
hear – to the point almost where when you don’t do that they’re
almost bummed, like, ‘Come on man – I don’t want to hear about
politics.’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that.”

But –
especially with The Black Market – Rise Against lyrics are
always open to interpretation. They can be personal, they can be
political, they can be a combination of the two – so you don’t
have to subscribe to whatever the actual message is behind these
songs...

“Well, this is
going to sound clichéd, but for me, and I guess a lot of people,
politics are personal. They are the most personal thing. It’s
an intimate relationship. Because it’s not just the guy you’re
voting for and the political party he belongs to, it’s everything –
it’s the way you’re spending you’re money, it’s the things
you’re watching on TV, it’s the things you’re listening to. So
it’s how you’re spending your time and your money and what you’re
eating, and that’s your DNA, that’s what makes you up as a
person. I definitely don’t expect our fans to have our beliefs, but
if they do, great. If they want to read the books we’ve talked
about on our records or if they’re copacetic with us, that’s
cool, or if they just want to come to our shows and have a good time,
that’s awesome too. Because that’s also what we are. We’re also
a punk band at heart that’s going to come and play a show in your
town. It’s just that we’ve been given an opportunity where
there’s actually people who are listening to what we’re saying
for however long amount of time and we’re choosing to not be the
rock guys and we’re choosing to say some things that are important
to us. That being said, were also a fun band, we also have the sense
of humour of a bunch of fourteen year olds – it’s not all
serious! But if we’re getting a bunch of kids listening to us, then
we’re going to try to talk about some things that we heard when we
were their ages, you know going to shows and there being tabling at
all the punk shows and political organisations we never would have
heard about otherwise. So we’re trying. But you definitely don’t
have to be in line with our belief system just to listen to our
band.”

So what would you
say the purpose of Rise Against in 2014 is? Have you exceeded all
expectations now or are there still things you want the band to do?

“Absolutely. I
think we’ve totally exceeded our expectations and I’ve heard
everyone in the band say that a thousand times. This band started
just being a band and going to play some shows, and it was playing
VFW halls and church basements, so to be where it is now has
completely exceeded our expectations. Of any punk band. No punk band
started to be where this band is now. It’s unbelievable to us. So I
think the point of continuing making records is just because we love
to do this. But we make records and we’re making records because we
have to. There’s nothing else the four guys in this band can do in
life. So there are no expectations, but there’s hopes. I hope
people pick it up, I hope people listen to it, I hope we change some
minds. I don’t expect that, but when it happens, it’s just the
greatest thing in the world. And if that keeps happening, then
awesome. It means we’re doing our job.”